We recently had the good fortune of speaking at ValleyML’s AI Expo 2022 earlier this month. This is an annual event that presents a unique combination of AI Technology, researchers, industry thought leaders and prospective buyers of AI/ML technologies in a single event. The 2022 edition promised even more interesting talks and networking opportunities as it spanned four days–as both an in-person (at the Santa Clara Convention Center) as well as online (remote worldwide attendance) event.
The conference saw folks from a number of organizations across the world gather to talk about AI adoption, its challenges, trends as well as predictions for the future. The event featured 60+ sessions, and saw over 2000 attendees. While we were invited to speak as a part of the retail track of the conference, we got a chance to attend sessions by speakers across the different tracks of the conference. While this meant hearing a variety of viewpoints, there were two themes that clearly stood out for us this year:
AI goes horizontal
The sheer breadth of industry verticals and viewpoints represented at the event was impressive. There were over 100 invited speakers from organizations across retail, healthcare, education, finance, agriculture, e-commerce, security, hardware, and others. Speakers from companies including Cloudphysician, Datakalp, UpBrains AI, CRED, Merlyn Mind, Hakom Time Series, Smile Identity, Nvidia, and Google touched on a range of topics from development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in production to specific AI solutions.
Furthermore, speakers, panelists and attendees included a diverse set of roles including data scientists, engineers, marketers, product developers, and CXOs. The message was clear. AI is no longer optional, or a capability that’s “nice to have”, but is in fact table stakes for all industries. With data becoming increasingly pervasive across the enterprise, being AI-conversant is becoming important across roles. The writing’s on the wall–If you are not investing in AI you are losing out, because your competitor definitely has a head start.
The long tail is rearing its head
Aside from the fact that at Scribble Data, we pride ourselves on being able to turn a witty phrase every now and then, we also pride ourselves in spotting fairly early on that data-driven solutions for long tail use cases is the way forward. A number of talks at the conference focused on the idea that AI is no longer limited to only the largest problems facing any given industry vertical. For instance, Hamid Motahari from Upbrains AI discussed automating long-tail business problems using AI, Kalpit Desai from Datakalp presented their take on protocol compliance (of which there are very many) in healthcare, and Aditya Vempaty from Merlyn Mind spoke about small task streamlining for educators. These talks reinforced our belief that there is enormous value to be realized in the often overlooked long tail of problems. Scribble’s own talk focussed on effective use case development in the retail space using Sub-ML feature stores and drew on our years of experience helping customers turn the right data into decisions, fast.
Our interactions at ValleyML AI Expo made it abundantly clear that AI is here to stay. But there are many approaches to the adoption of AI across businesses of all sizes. From buying the right set of tools, platforms, and solutions to investing in hiring in-house teams and building custom infrastructure, the optimal approach will be dictated by constraints such as data availability and maturity, budgets, timelines, and solution focus.
As always, it was great to share the stage with an amazing roster of speakers including friends of Scribble Data – Dileep Unnikrishnan, Kalpit Desai, Aditya Vempaty, Rosana de Oliveira Gomes, and Meisong Yan. A big shout out to the session chairs for the “AI in Retail” track, Sharmistha Chatterjee and George Williams for curating a great set of sessions, and a thank you from team Scribble Data for inviting us to be a part of, and speak at the Expo.
If you’re in the business of data or wondering how you can leverage data for key decision-making, we’d love to hear from you. And if you’re looking for your next adventure and would like to play a key role in how organizations can significantly reduce friction in data consumption, we’d love to talk to you about open roles we are hiring for.
Check out https://www.scribbledata.io/careers and drop us a line!